


Take My Shadow

by Razzledazzy



Series: Be My Break of Day [2]
Category: Until Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Hiding Medical Issues, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Medication, Multi, Not Following Psychologist's Advice Is Bad Guys, Psychological Trauma, Refusing Treatment, Suicidal Thoughts, Supernatural Elements, Wendigo Josh Washington, don't do that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-08
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2019-03-15 09:38:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13610631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Razzledazzy/pseuds/Razzledazzy
Summary: The horror story is over, they all survived the night. Seven friends return to their homes in LA, and the last one follows them home.There are always people are willing to help glue all your broken pieces back together, but first Chris has to stop smashing all the vases.He's never had great impulse control.





	Take My Shadow

Everyone left pieces of themselves up on the mountain, some of them physical and some of them mental. Each of the survivors stumbled through interrogations, unsure of what story the world was ready to hear. Not everyone had learned about the wendigos, Matt and Jess in particular had no information to put together with the atrocities they had seen. Somehow, they had both missed out on all the things that the rest of the group had come to know during their night of horrors. It would probably be a long time before they all had a chance to get together and get their stories straight about what happened up on that mountain.

When they turned the camera on him, Chris still wasn’t even sure how many of them had made it out alive.

It was agonizing. Re-telling the story of what had happened took every ounce of motivation he had left. His heart rabbited with each recollection and each answer he gave felt like a betrayal of confidence of something bigger than himself. The secrets of Blackwood Pines should stay secret, and yet Chris’ plan to skirt around the issues of paranormal and supernatural only lasted until the mention of the rawest wound he’d received on the mountain.

“And Josh?” the investigator inquired politely. It didn’t matter how carefully the subject was broached, the mere mention of his best friend almost broke Chris. The tears from the pain and the exhaustion from every fucked up moment from the trip crashed through the leftover euphoria that came from actually making it off the mountain alive.

Chris sniffed hard, suppressing his outward reactions to the best of his abilities, “What about him?”

“We haven’t recovered his body.”

That snapped his attention back from the agonizing pressure in his chest. 

"The wendigo-” Chris murmured to himself. The wendigo had to have taken Josh... but Mike had gotten the cable car keys somehow. Was Josh dead? There was blood on his jacket sleeve where Chris rubbed his thumb back and forth as he thought. The presence of the blood itself didn’t bother him, but the fact that he had no idea whose blood it was made him want to burn the whole thing.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Chris said, firmer. Hannah must have taken Josh before she followed the other wendigos to the lodge. She was in there when Mike hit the lights, if Hannah was dead there could be a small chance Josh was still alive.

“The wendigo took him down to the mines,” Chris imparted with solid assurance. They wouldn’t believe him. Hell, yesterday he wouldn’t have believed those words either.

Today was an entirely new era, one that Chris wasn’t sure he could fathom alone. Some form of magic or spiritual possession had created the wendigos. Who knew if there were other things like them out in the world? Everything he thought he knew was wrong.

Once again, Chris fervently wished that he had been able to prevent the stranger's death, if only for the information the man had never written down.

As he sat in the interrogation chair, he thought about all the choices he regretted making. There were things he knew that he should have done differently, but you know what they say about hindsight.

If he’d been more careful and not injured his leg, he could have gone with Sam to find Mike and Josh. Maybe could have brought everyone back safely, if he hadn’t slipped in the goddamn snow running from a wendigo.

Strangely, the only decision he didn’t regret was shooting himself instead of Ashley. Even though the powder burns still stung his face and the star shaped wound and it’s accompanying bruise nearly the right corner of his jaw, down onto his neck. It was the only option he had seen at the time. It was pure luck that he hadn’t broken his jaw with the blank’s discharge, or actually killed himself. Blanks have been known to kill when pressed right against the skull; logically, he should be grateful it hadn’t killed him.

So why wasn’t he?

The interviewer finally noticed his expression and the stiffness laid over his shoulders. He let out a slightly frustrated tut, telling him that would be all for now.

It was a dismissal, not an ending. None of this was an ending. This couldn’t end like this. Josh may have done some terrible things last night, but he didn’t deserve whatever fate awaited him in the mines.

Everyone had left pieces of themselves on the mountain, but Chris wasn’t sure he came back at all.

 

* * *

 

His prison sentence was four days in the hospital, pending a full psychiatric evaluation. The police hadn’t taken his words about the wendigo seriously. How could they? They wouldn't know the truth if it broke their legs.  

At least their battered group were all being kept in the same ward. It gave them a chance to talk.

There was a noticeable gap in their group that the conversation couldn’t quite flow over. The jokes were far less frequent, and Chris himself couldn’t bring himself to make a pun to fill the blanks. There was no reason to. Josh wasn’t here to appreciate them.

Jess and Mike were almost inseparable now, which was good. They both required the most surgery and would have to stay longer than the others. Emily and Matt had broken up, but both of them would sit on Jess’ bed and talk with her while Mike was gone to ease her newfound separation anxiety and short term memory issues.

Jess and Emily’s friendship had mended stronger than it had been before all of the drama from the first lodge party. It was a good thing, but it still made the hollow feeling in Chris’ stomach grow colder.

He missed his best friend.

Mike and Sam had also tried to get the cops to see reason. They left out all mention of the wendigo, and instead told them about a ‘prank’ Josh had been trying to set up in the mines. They were so worried about their friend, couldn’t you see? Sam’s pleas in particular had gotten them to send a team up to the mines to look for Josh.

The team came back with Beth’s remains and no one else. At least the Washingtons would have one of their children to bury.

However; the search and rescue team brought back an unexpected visitor from the mountain.

Wolfie, the “dog” Mike had mentioned during his interrogation had been found by investigators poking around the smouldering remains of the lodge and brought down from the mountain. Mike was overjoyed of course, and pleaded with the hospital staff to let them keep the dog in their ward so the hospital’s actual therapy dog could spend time checking up on sick children instead of them.

Oh the power of being handsome and just sad looking enough to manipulate the nurses, but hey, they got a dog out of the deal so Chris wasn't as resentful as he usually would be of Mike using his wiles.

Sam had demanded that they give the dog a bath, which had been difficult with most of them being too injured to risk a slip on wet tile. Chris, nursing two cracked ribs and a buckle fracture in his left tibia, was deemed unfit for the task by Sam. Ashley and Matt ended up to be the ones to try and wash the dog in the hospital shower. It worked about as well as you’d expect. Everyone involved ended up drenched, but laughing.

Chris faked his smile at the scene.

Ashley was the only one to notice. Afterwards, when everyone else was resting from the exertion, she sat down on the side of his bed.

“You miss him, don’t you?” she asked softly.

“How could I not? I know, I know that he did some terrible things to us. To me. I thought I’d killed you, then the saw went to him anyway. For hours I thought I’d killed him and I felt horrible that I’d picked either choice. It just sucks. It was one bad night against twelve years of friendship. I couldn’t hate him for what happened even if I wanted to. I was the only one that knew how sick he was and I should have noticed he wasn’t taking his meds-” Chris’ shoulders shuddered, the entire bed shifting as Ashley leaned over to wrap an arm around his shoulders.

“You can’t hate yourself for what happened either, Chris. You- you were the only one of us that did the right thing and tried to go after him. You were the only one of us that was willing to risk it.”

“Loads of good that did, I got that other guy killed. We didn’t even know his name!”

“That's not fair to you either, that man was a professional. He knew the risks when he went with you to the shed. Chris you barely made it back, you can't wonder what else could have happened. It'll eat you up alive.”

He sighed, “Maybe you’re right.”

Ashley didn’t say anything more, she just patted his shoulder and continued to lean against his uninjured side. A small comfort in a the white washed walls of their prison ward.

 

* * *

 

After the fourth day, Chris was able to shimmy a pair of jeans over the splint keeping his fractured leg stable and get dressed in something other than sweats and jackets given to them by the police department. His parents couldn’t have known that some of the clothes they had brought up were actually Josh’s, but it was comforting to pull on the well worn hoodie with ‘Pun Intended’ on it that had been left at his place sometime in the past few years.

His chest burned with the heartache of it all (and the broken ribs).

Hobbling out of what he not-so-affectionately thought of as _their_ ward, Chris made his way to the psychoanalyst under his own power. Waving away Mike’s offer to walk him down the hall. Everyone meant well, but Chris needed some time alone with his thoughts.

The even, soulless spacing of the white tiles provided a rhythm he could lose himself in. Hop forward two tiles, move crutches up three tiles more, hop again and repeat. He only stopped when he had to turn around the corner, looking up to make sure he didn’t run into anyone.

Ice chilled in his spine as he caught sight of his reflection, for a moment just seeing the hoodie… he had thought that he’d seen Josh. It was a bitter self deprecating chuckle. It was wishful thinking, but when turned his head back to the empty hall there was still someone standing there in jeans and a familiar, comfortably worn hoodie.

“Josh?” Chris’ voice cracked. It wasn’t possible. Someone would have told them if he'd been found.

All his eyes could focus on was Josh’s trademark smirk, the one he would wear after telling a particularly good punchline, thrown back at him like a weapon. Each movement set off alarms in Chris’ mind. This was wrong, Josh wasn’t okay when he was taken. Even as the expression morphed into one of Josh’s genuine smiles, Chris' knuckles wrapped around the pivot of the crutch whitened. The wood creaked as he took a step forward. Only for the specter of Josh to turn away.

“See you later, bro,” echoed down the hall along with static that buzzed inside Chris’ brain at the impossibility of it all.

“Wait-” he called, shaking his head and hopping his way behind the retreating figure of his best friend. “Josh, wait!” Chris said, following him down the hall.

Ahead of him, Josh turned a corner.

Rounding the same corner, Chris came to a stop, the pain in his ribs absolutely forbidding him from continuing further until he rested for a few minutes. Any sign that Josh had been there was gone.

In a daze, Chris lurched over to a bench on the side of the hall opposite from where he had last seen Josh. It was wrong, he knew it was wrong. Josh wasn’t here. They’d left him.

_He’d left him._

“God, Josh. I’m so sorry,” Chris gritted out, hand fisted in the material of Josh’s hoodie. Like it could tether Josh back to him. It was getting harder to breathe.

“I’m so sorry,” he repeated. Over and over again. Like a prayer.

The lenses of his glasses smeared with teardrops, and he pulled them off. Barely resisting the urge to fling them into the blurry white void of the hospital.

If only he could wake up a week ago and stop everything from happening- or a year ago to stop Hannah from falling for their shitty idea of a prank.

Was he cursed to spend his whole life sleeping?  

Josh had said something similar about his dependency on his phone, the phone that lay up on the mountain somewhere. Just as lost and abandoned as Josh. Was he dead yet? How many nights had passed since that singular night of hell? How many more lifetimes over had Josh suffered if he wasn’t already dead? It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. Chris should have stayed on the mountain until they found him.

It was minutes, seconds, hours later when Mike and Sam found him. The tears had stopped but his head remained bowed as if buried in the collar of a parka he was no longer wearing.

With gentle care, Sam pried the glasses out of his hands and cleaned them, while Mike picked up the crutches that had slid to the ground.

“We just left him behind, how could we do that to him?”

The question hung heavy between the three of them, they had been the last ones to see Josh alive.

Mike leaned the crutches against the painted walls. He took a seat facing Chris on the bench, the leg not folded under him leg jiggling up and down full of nervous energy.

“It wasn’t you that failed him. When Josh and I were coming back through- through the mines, there was a lake we had to go through to get away from where the wendigo lived. Something pulled me under the water and dragged me to the side, then it went back for Josh. It had Hannah’s tattoo, he recognized it. She took him, I didn’t know what to do so I ran. I was scared of dying, so I ran,”  Mike folded his hands together in his lap, bandages overlapped in a way that made him look uncertain.

Regret is what Chris would have called it, but it wasn’t his call to make. Mike was looking for forgiveness. The kind no one here could give to him.

“Then, then he’s just down there. Suffering like she did. We left him. What kind of friends are we that we’d leave both of them down there to rot? T-they won’t let me try to go back. Not until the investigations over. They won’t keep looking either. We’ve killed him. We’ve just as good as killed him, and I know I already killed him once before but this is- this is horrible. Oh god, god oh god,” Chris rocked back and forth, broken leg stretched out awkwardly in front of him. “What if he turns into one of those things?”

It was what they were all thinking, but no one had the strength to bring it up.

Softly, Sam sat on Chris’ other side. “I don’t think that the others have thought of that, and I think it’s better that they don’t know it’s a possibility. Mike hasn’t told anyone else what happened yet, but we want to know what you think-” _since he was your best friend_ hung in the air, unsaid but acknowledged nonetheless.   
  
“Fuck,” Chris covered his face with his hands and inhaled. Crying would not make things any easier. He'd lost all of his tears already. “You guys are right. They have been through _enough_ , we can do this for them. If we can’t help Josh, we can help them,” Chris nodded with falsified conviction. It didn’t make his heart feel any fuller.

The three of them sat in silence for a while, with only Mike’s occasional fidgeting making any noise. Sam’s hoarse voice eventually broke the contemplation of the moment. “You missed your psych appointment. They’re probably not going to let you leave now.”

“I’m not sure they should let me,” Chris said quietly, leaning back to ease the pressure on his ribs.

Mike’s head jerked to look down the hall, but it was just someone passing by the corridor, gradually the tension leaked out of his shoulders bit by bit. Neither of the others brought it up.

Bones and bruises would heal, but there was no telling if the other injuries would ever scar over.

When they got up from the bench, Chris took bother of their hands to help haul himself up.

 

* * *

 

Coming back to LA felt nothing like coming home. Shedding each extra layer that kept him warm in Canada was nothing like relief. The weight bowing his shoulders didn’t ease up when they were dappled with bright California sunshine.

He didn’t have a home anymore.

When they started at UCLA, Josh and Chris had both chucked their money into a two bedroom apartment instead of a dorm (with Josh doing most of the chucking). It wasn’t extravagant by any means, but the location was great. _That_ had been his home.

It wasn’t really home without Josh.

Rent wouldn’t be due again until the end of the spring semester, there was no way he could raise enough to cover both halves by then. He’d have to leave. Again. Abandon all the things he had left of Josh.

History was circular, here he was repeating the exact same steps Josh had taken a year before. Right down to the hoodie he was wearing and the bottle of antipsychotics stuffed into the pocket.

This time the bottle had his name on it.

It wasn’t risperidone, but it might as well have been. Like stones they hung heavy in his pocket, weighing on the fabric of his mind. He was conflicted over whether or not he should take them.

Josh should have been taking his meds, if he had, none of this would have happened.

If Chris didn’t take his meds, he might see Josh again.

Chris sighed, dropping his bags right beside the couch. There were books open everywhere. Mostly textbooks, but some of them had been books Josh had picked up and then never finished reading.

Chris slid all the books off the coffee table and onto the floor without a care for losing his place in them. He wouldn’t be needing them anytime soon. The psychiatrists in Canada had recommended he take the rest of the semester off to heal and recover. It was the same platitude they had given Josh.

Look how well that turned out.

It was too stuffy in here, he couldn't breathe. Walking to the window, he threw open the curtains to let some light in. 

 

* * *

 

The universe was having a good laugh at Chris' expense.

He took solace in two activities, listening to music and- surprising everyone that had ever known him in his 20 years of life, exercising. In particular he was working towards learning how to mountain climb.

Never again was he going to be trapped in a situation where he was unable to defend himself or run away. Technically he was barely cleared for physical activity, that didn’t stop him from pushing past all recommendations of rest. Sometimes on his morning runs he would see Josh. Running just ahead of him until he turned a corner and vanished.

Whether it was a paranormal phenomenon or his own psychosis, Chris could never tell. There were tick marks in both columns. At least until Chris spent a night locked out of his own bathroom after seeing a very convincing wendigo coming at him from the shower. That was firmly a tally in the ‘psychosis’ box. The window in their- his bathroom- wasn’t big enough for anyone to get in or out.

It was nerve wracking, but not enough for him to take the medicine. For the first time, Chris understood why Josh struggled with taking his medications for all those years.  

That thought made him feel even worse.

So here he was, running from his thoughts and his problems.

Powering up his ipod, Chris reveled in the mindlessness of his run. The mending bone in his leg protested with pain and his muscles burned, but it just made it easier for him not to think as he jogged up the hill.

This was the fourth time he’d run the trails in the Angeles National Park, eventually he’d do a climb up Mount Baldy, but he had work to do before he was ready for a 10,000 foot climb in elevation.

Things were different when you controlled how you got onto and off of a mountain. At least that’s what he told himself. He was getting stronger, he would never, ever be that vulnerable again.

It wouldn’t help him fight off his hallucinations, but it helped with his other anxieties. Everyone had their own way of working through things. Jessica had begun vlogging to help with her short term memory loss, and she’d acquired quite a following on social media. It helped, at least he thought, that people were so positive about her scars and how well her makeup tutorials worked. Out of all of them, Jess seemed to be setting the standard of recovery among their group.

He ran to the beat of the song until his heart synced with the bass line, pushing his lungs to capacity as he breathed in the dry air and let it suck the moisture from his eyes. That was why he did this. That split second chance of being free from his emotions was worth all the physical work it took to get here. Country roads take me home, right?

And then he tripped on a rock.

Typical.

Chris skid along the trail, scraping up his hands and knees and jarring all of his recently healed wounds.

“Fucking-” he swore, picking his ipod off the ground. The screen hadn’t cracked, which was a miracle, but when he turned it around the silver casing was scratched to hell and back.

There in the reflection was something that sent him reeling backward onto his ass, kicking his way back across the dirt until he hit a tree. Well, a tree by California standards.

The reflection was Josh, with half of his face torn into a snarl with teeth much longer than they should be. This wasn’t how he expected to see Josh, not how he remembered him or how he thought of him when he closed his eyes for the night.

This was wrong, alien.

And then the reflection moved, becoming larger. Chris couldn’t help it. He turned, dirt digging into the scrapes on his palms and looked right into a face he never expected to see again.

“Josh?” his voice cracked over the word like a wave of glass.

The creature’s head tilted to the side, sunlight glittering off of teeth that had no business in a human’s mouth. Hell, they didn’t belong in the mouth of any animal that Chris could think of. Which at the moment, wasn’t a lot of animals, because he was panicking and losing his mind at the same time.

It was only a matter of time.

He didn’t know if this was how hallucinations were supposed to go. Whenever he’d caught glimpses of Josh in the past they’d been just that, glimpses of a face that he longed to see.

This wasn’t the same- this Josh was covered in blood, the dark brown color staining the texture of his clothes until he looked like a walking extra from Criminal Minds, or one of those other murder-mystery police procedural shows. If those shows featured half-wendigos with snaggled teeth as murder victims.

Chris’ breathing didn’t even out, if anything it got worse, jagged shards of something in his chest trying to shred its way out through his heart.

“Josh?”

There was a trundle sound from its throat, Chris expected something inhuman, a shriek. Instead it just sounded like that one time Josh got the flu after going to a frat party on campus. The thought annihilated Chris’ desire to get away. Josh had been miserable for the week he’d been sick, pitiful at times. It was a handful of small memories Chris held close to his heart. He’d skipped class for almost a week to take care of him.

It repeated the sound too low for Chris to make out.

“You gotta speak up.”

This is crazy. He was crazy. He knew what those teeth belonged to, and if Josh was here. If this was Josh, this wasn’t good. This was definitely bad.

Josh’s face scrunched up, achingly familiar, then it sounded out the words carefully, stumbling over each intonation, but getting it out without too much interference. “Wanted home. Left. Mountain. Venn diagram spit stuck.”

“Venn diagram? Vendigra? _Oh,_ Wendigo,” Chris tried to mask his panic with babble, “Yeah, sure, Wendigo spit. Or did you mean spirit? That’s a rhetorical question don’t bother answering it. Just hold on, let me get this straight- I mean, it doesn’t really matter does it? Wait, stuck? Stuck as in stuck on the mountain? Oh. Oh my god, and we just left you up there when all we had to do is bring you home and you would have been fine?” His words hitched up at the end like a question, even though the answer was right in front of him.

Josh’s shoulders hitched in a movement Chris suspected was meant to be a shrug.  

Too many things were happening in his brain all at once, it was all crashing down on him at once.

“You mean you’re not a wendigo?”

He shrugged again, the movement smoother than it was the first time, like he was remembering how.

Fuck, fuck this was a bad idea, and yet here he was.

“It’s been months, Josh, where have you been?”

“Walked.”

“Walked? From Canada to LA!?”

Another shrug.

Chris felt a tug of irritation that was very familiar, the kind he felt when Josh pulled some stunt that was stupid and dangerous, just because he could or because it would make other people laugh.

Other people... the others! Some of them would be happy to see Josh alive and moderately well. Okay, so maybe Sam was the only one he could think of off the top of his head, but- oh who was he kidding? Chris didn’t think this would go over well with anyone else. They were fine with things when Josh was dead, but faced with the prospect of him being alive? That wouldn't hold.

He didn’t want to set anyone’s recovery back, but he couldn’t leave Josh on another mountain.

There had to be a way to make this work. Josh fucked up on the mountain, badly. He wasn’t the only one though, and no one had actually died as a result of his actions (unlike the year before). If the rest of them were warranted a second chance after that, Josh deserved a chance.

He shoved his ipod into his pocket and extended a hand. “Come on, we’re going home.”

If the universe wouldn’t Chris a second chance, then Chris would make it change its mind.


End file.
